Madonna’s Girls’ School Scrapped

A plan by Madonna’s charitable foundation, Raising Malawi, to finance and build a $15 million girls’ school in Africa has reportedly been scuttled amid accusations of mismanagement, but other plans to help the country are in the works.

The board of directors for the charity were ousted March 24 in favor of a caretaker board that includes Madonna and her manager, according to the New York Times.

Global Philanthropy Group founder Trevor Neilson, hired by Madonna last fall amid the group’s leadership shakeup, told the Times that former executive director Philippe van den Bossche’s management style and alleged overspending on salaries, cars, office space, golf course membership and other expenditures plus costs to build the school led to the project’s collapse.

“Despite $3.8 million having been spent by the previous management team, the project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, overall, a startling lack of accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United States,” Neilson said. “We have yet to determine exactly what happened to all of that $3.8 million.”

Despite the setback, foundation officials say they’re still looking into other ways to help improve education programs in Malawi with the $18 million the organization has raised so far, the paper said.